


man overboard

by borage (haechansheaven)



Series: oikawa week 2020 [3]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Day 3: Disappointment, Dreams and Nightmares, M/M, Mention of Therapy, Nautical/Ocean Themes, Oikawa Week 2020, brazil oihina
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-07-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:47:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25344910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haechansheaven/pseuds/borage
Summary: This is what it feels like to lose. Every opportunity that was in his hands fell into the water and sunk to the bottom, buried under over a million particles of sand.It’s blue—a deep, deep blue—and Tooru can’t see where it ends.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Oikawa Tooru, Iwaizumi Hajime & Oikawa Tooru
Series: oikawa week 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1832464
Comments: 9
Kudos: 35
Collections: Oikawa Week 2020





	man overboard

**Author's Note:**

> for oikawa week, day 3: disappointment.
> 
>  **note** : there are spoilers if you are anime-only. set during the years hinata is in brazil.
> 
> i did not edit this one. i did not even consider giving it a read-over. i apologize for any errors/typos/etc.

Tooru drifts on a boat in the middle of the ocean, alone, legs held against his chest, forehead pressed to his knees. The sun is blistering, overbearing, and all around him is nothing but ocean. This is what it feels like to be lost, he realizes. This is what it feels like to lose. Every opportunity that was in his hands fell into the water and sunk to the bottom, buried under over a million particles of sand.

It’s blue—a deep, deep blue—and Tooru can’t see where it ends.

He was sure that this was it. There was a moment where he so clearly saw the shore on the other side of a mountain made of waves. All it took, however, was a breath to pull it from his grasp. That vision, too, collapsed in on itself and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

Every expectation set has been of his own creation. He folds the corners, writes with his favorite pen, and tucks it into his pocket until it grows too large and takes on a life of its own. Tooru, who dreams of a galaxy beyond his reach with another life, another name, another destiny, stares at the horizon with a sense of regret, foreboding, and sadness. He still isn’t sure how to achieve what he wants.

Achievements, in the grand scheme of things, add up, though never as fast as Tooru wants them to. He wraps them around his body like bandages to keep himself whole. Something about it is choking, though, and it is through defeat that he learns that he must find another way. Day by day, none of this is enough, and more and more of him is lost to the waves, far, far behind him.

These failed expectations are not hidden in chests, and eventually they are torn to pieces by the ocean. It is an unforgiving entity whose fingers dig into the surface and pull things apart until they are unrecognizable.

His boat drifts, and Tooru remains alone. Sometimes others will join him. Those moments are far and few between, though and, in the end, it’s always him, his boat, and the sea.

At twenty-one, he learns that the sea is made of tears. It’s poetic and cliché, and the realization is borne from sitting down and trying to count every single shortcoming on his fingers and toes. There are too many to count, though, and perhaps it’s just him being difficult with himself. Perhaps he actually has that many failures.

Sometimes the boat rocks, and Tooru finds himself flung overboard. He’s chained to it, though, the boat dragging him farther and farther from whatever shore he started from.

Tooru tells his therapist this in broken Spanish, describing a boat, a big, big ocean, and a lot of sadness. “I am in the boat,” he says. “I cannot leave the boat.”

It’s moments like this that Tooru wonders if he made a mistake coming here. Chasing his dreams has been a never-ending endeavor and in the moments he feels lost and alone, Tooru wishes to turn back time. He tells Hajime this one night, towel resting around his shoulders, body hunched over. Hajime’s fork stops half-way to his mouth, clattering into his bowl.

“What the fuck?”

“Iwa—”

“I don’t want to hear that from _you_ ,” Hajime points at him through the camera, scowl pixilated and stuttering. It’s brief, though, and Hajime leans back, arms crossed. “But my apartment is always open to you if you need somewhere to run to.”

Tough love. Hajime overs it to him in droves, even when Tooru doesn’t deserve it. Wringing his hands, Tooru smiles. “It’s nice to know that there’s a place for me to be.”

Two weeks later, in Brazil, Shoyou Hinata steps onto his small little boat, rocks it a few times, and helps Tooru to shore. It is there that he learns to crawl, totter, and run. At the top of a mountain, he turns his face towards the sun and realizes that failures are simply a part of climbing towards the apex.

He still ends up back in the boat when everything is said and done, though that breath of fresh air, that moment, was enough to propel him further a few more steps.

He stares up at Wakatoshi from his knees, the two separated by a net. This, in a way, is a failure, though every moment exactly like this amounts to an uncrossable ravine. More than anything, Tooru has failed to produce. He has failed to meet the expectations set upon his shoulders by the world.

(This is a lie. These were—these _are_ —expectations created by Tooru’s own subconsciousness. The only person he disappoints is himself. His fingers lace together as he’s dragged farther and farther into his own mind. This is how it is, sometimes.)

Tooru spends moments untangling the threads that tie him to Wakatoshi. All together, scrunched up, he can’t decipher what any of them mean. There are thousands of colors, ones that the human eye shouldn’t be able to decipher. The second to last thread is _love_ , and Tooru scoffs at it for a moment before holding it against his chest and wondering why this one was buried so deep, why this one is so frayed, what lies underneath it.

At the foundation, at the base, is _awe_. Something about the attention and power that Wakatoshi commands is so strong it was able to support jealousy and confusion and love and failure. Tooru picks at the fibers with his nails, but the thread won’t break. Wakatoshi is tied to Tooru as much as he is tied to greatness.

Tooru wants that, too—he wants greatness to be chained to his ankles, grabbing him by the hair and yanking him into the heavens, because nothing comes without a little suffering.

Across the net, Wakatoshi’s shine, for Tooru, starts to dull.

The sun is Shoyou’s mother. She holds him in hands that shine so bright, it took years for Tooru to see how much he resembles her. He holds Tooru with the same sort of warmth and Hajime tells him to accept it, so he does. It’s never for forever, and eventually Tooru is staring out of windows, gaze ignoring the sun.

 _How could you give birth to a man who makes me so happy?_ he thinks, closing his eyes. _How could a man be borne from a star?_

He asks Tobio this, because Tobio would know better than anyone how brightly Shoyou shines, wouldn’t he? Tobio, who stood in the direct light of the sun for so long that freckles dot his soul and sometimes he cries about how cold the world is so far, far away. Tooru wonders if this is what happens when you see happiness and yet do not chase it.

“I don’t know,” Tobio says, quickly adding, “How would I know? _Why_ would I know?”

“What do you mean?”

“I loved him, but I didn’t understand him.” There’s a sort of finality to Tobio’s tone, like this should be obvious. Like he’s not _supposed_ to understand Shoyou. “You don’t have to understand someone when you love them, right?”

“And when did you get so wise, hm?”

“Sugawara calls sometimes,” Tobio says this, like it answers all the questions, and Tooru figures that it does. Koushi is fierce and intuitive, and there’s always something _there_ that he catches before anyone else. Rather than a sturdy foundation that never rocks, he is volatile and unpredictable, though a place that you can build a home. “He gets it.”

Tooru scuffs his shoes against the concrete and thinks about the layers of the sole that he’s losing. Not that it really matters. He can always buy a new pair. Shoes are replaceable. “It must be pretty disappointing that I’m coming to you for help, huh? It must be funny.”

“Not really.” Tobio sounds like he’s shifting around, fabric rubbing together, before he yawns, a high-pitched sound. “It’s not at all. Nobody knows everything.”

When did Tobio get so smart? When did Tobio grow up so much? Tooru can’t remember looking at Tobio and ever seeing someone older than thirteen. Without him realizing, without him thinking, Tobio has grown into someone that’s dependable and aware of themselves in a way that Tooru cannot believe.

Life is full of moments like these.

Shoyou’s hand is small, but calloused, and he recounts stories about each one on a warm night in Brazil. Tooru listens to tales spun in the years after he left Japan and thinks about the people with a sort of fondness that he doesn’t understand. The juice that Shoyou drinks is sweet at first, the taste rolling into an overwhelming sort of sourness that makes Tooru to pucker his lips and sit back in surprise.

It had been funny enough to earn him a laugh, and that was nice. A lot of this is nice. Tooru has learned a lot of new things here. Most importantly, he’s learned to love again.

The feel of a volleyball against his hand had become foreign the same way a word starts to look wrong the more times you spell it out. And Tooru had written _stop_ again and again and again on his palm until he couldn’t tell whether he was asking for time to stop or he had allowed the gods to drag his misery out to the edges of the universe.

“It’s fun to learn something new, don’t you think?” Shoyou asks, leaning forward like he’s made the greatest discovery in human history. “I know I’m right, you don’t have to tell me that.”

And Tooru doesn’t, because Shoyou is absolutely right.

Before everything is said and done, and Tooru falls in love with Shoyou, because that’s inevitable, don’t you know, he finds joy in quiet mornings—phone calls with his mother, and sometimes his father, and always his nephew. Takeru tells him, one day, about a trip to the ocean, where he had collected crabs in a bucket, only to let them go at the end of the day.

“Mom said I couldn’t take them home,” Takeru grumbles. He’s older now, but still a child, no matter how mature he acts. Tooru thinks it must be a family thing. “We should go there when you come home again.”

There’s a sort of question that floats at the edge of their conversation. A _when_. Takeru asks it once a month—“When are you coming home?”—and Tooru doesn’t know how to say _maybe never_. Tooru doesn’t know how to tell Takeru that it may never be Tooru coming home and it may be Takeru flying over oceans to Argentina to see the country that Tooru has found a second home in.

“I miss the beach,” it’s a loaded statement, because Tooru means the beach back home and the beach that has _become_ home, accompanied by a head of bright orange hair and a laugh so loud it washes away every worry in Tooru’s mind. “Yeah, we’ll go when I come back.”

“You used to hate the beach.” Takeru sounds quiet because he’s right.

“Yeah, well, people can change.”

The first time Shoyou kisses him, Tooru tastes dandelions, and hears the sound of four cars on an empty road in Miyagi. It’s nothing like he expects, but Tooru has learned, even if he should’ve known, that what he expects from Shoyou is never what he gets. He makes life exciting, introducing Tooru to a world he only caught a glimpse of once on a volleyball court, the feeling of defeat electrifying his throat.

Fire licks his fingertips and Shoyou holds his hands through a proverbial rollercoaster as the sun disappears into the ocean. The moment it extinguishes, Shoyou, too, finds calm, body sprawled out across the floor. Pedro asks Tooru if he likes _One Piece_ and Tooru thinks, _Yeah, a little_ , but says no, gaze trailing back to the television.

All the audio is in Portuguese and Tooru thinks he hears a familiar word here or there, though Shoyou laughs when he asks if he’s right.

That night, in the silence, Tooru asks Shoyou if he’s happy here and Shoyou answers, honestly, “I don’t know if I’m happy here, but I know I’m going to be eventually.”

It’s a good lesson in patience and fortune, and Tooru looks at Shoyou, who stares at him without any expectations.

“And, you know,” Shoyou reaches out to flatten Tooru’s hair, “you will, too.”

With a few words, Shoyou rocks the boat and threatens to overturn the whole entire thing. In Shoyou’s world, there’s no room for the short buffer between disappointment and getting back up on your feet. He’s been handed a million and one things that should have beaten him into the ground until he couldn’t even think to walk again.

His words are an earthquake and then— _peace_.

“When, do you think?”

Shoyou stares at the ceiling, listens to his phone ring once in the corner of the room, before smiling. “I can’t tell you, but I know it’ll come.”

Tooru trusts him.

In his dreams, Tooru sits in a boat. It’s a bit lonely, and he tucks his chin over his knees as he stares out over the vast ocean. There’s a breeze, clouds coat the sky, and in the distance, he thinks he can see an island. On the shore are a hundred familiar faces who are ready to greet him.

He rocks the boat until he falls out and swims his way until sand shifts under his feet.

It’s not until he’s resting on the beach, sand sticking to his wet skin, that he realizes that he’s no longer tied to the boat.

In the morning, when Tooru wakes up, he feels a little lighter. There are still things in the periphery that he must address and that tug on the hem of his shirt as he walks his way through his apartment. It doesn’t really matter, though. He’s sure this will rear its ugly head again and pull him back out to sea. It doesn’t really matter, though.

This moment, right here, right now, Tooru breathes in deep and stands in the sunlight. The boat is docked and the ocean no longer shoves itself down his throat. On his bedside table, his phone rings a familiar song.

Picking up the phone, he laughs, a relieved sound without saying a word.

“Oh,” Hajime says, sort of breathless. “You’re okay.”

“Right now,” manages Tooru.

“Right now is better than never.”


End file.
